Approaching the language of politics in a Cognitive manner

The title implies the non-literal use of language of politics and will focus on the metonymic use of /here/ and /there/ in speeches from the Hellenic Parliament; in other words I will argue on schematic transformations of the metonymic models of /edo/ and /eki/. The analysis will not be based on a discourse approach, rather on a cognitive one. 


Politics like all spheres of social activity, has its own code, a term used by linguists to refer to a language 
           variety of a particular group. The cognitive process that relates literal meanings to extended       
            meanings is known as mapping. Mapping is the projection of one set of conceptual entities 
            onto another set of conceptual shifts. We mentally trace a path from a conceptually salient   
            conceptual entity to another conceptual entity. I.e.) /πως φτάσαμε ως εδώ/ à politicians/ 
            economic situation The notion of salient/ saliency is a reference point which allows to access     
            another conceptual entity, the target.

Speakers are likely to employ hyperbole in the course of what can broadly be considered political activities. Metaphor and metonymy act as mechanisms to bring the audience to see the facts at issue in the way the speakers want them to see these facts.“When the speaker senses the possibility that the members of the audience have a value which will work to his/hers advantage, if he/she can stimulate them to experience a fantasy concerning the consequences of the facts as he/she wants them seem, the probability of hyperbole being used increases even more” (Swartz; 1976:113).

Since we are dealing with political speech the conceptualization of time and place in virtue of metonymy is grounded by the relation of a situation to the experience of the speaker. The speaker is the reference point of time and place. Temporal cognition is one aspect of conceptual structure which relates to our conceptualization of time. Unlike space, time is not a concrete or physical sensory experience. Temporal experience is both phenomenologically real and subjective. Subjective experience of time is not a single unitary phenomenon; it is compromised of experiences such as our ability to access & perceive duration, simultaneity and points of time.

The spatio-temporal anchoring of our language is not only the basis of our understanding of linguistic messages, but also the basis for anticipating certain kinds of linguistic messages. We locate entities and situations spatially and each of these expressions carries a different degree of explicitness in the encoding referents of the world. Explicitness incorporates the weighted relevance of various conceived elements of the situation with respect to the communicative intent of the speaker.

Talmy (1983) and Langacker (1986, 1988) observed that the way we locate objects with respect to one another involves the recognition of some kind of asymmetrical relation between the object we want to locate and the object with respect to which we locate it. According to them, asymmetrical relations are recognized with respect to size, containment, support, orientation, order, direction, distance, motion, or a combination of these. For Svorou (1993) a spatial-arrangement of two entities may be described in a number of ways, each of which constitutes a ‘construal’.

Examples:

1. "Εμείς είμαστε εδώ και θα παραμείνουμε εδώ, ενώ εσείς είστε και θα παραμείνετε εκεί"

/ekei/ in this context means ‘away from’; according to Talmy it refers to the motion of a schematically Figure along a path that progressively increases its distance from a schematically pointlike Ground. 

2. «Πώς φτάσαμε ως εδώ»

The utterance is a part of a political debate in the Hellenic Parliament. One representative of a political party elaborates on argumentation against the insufficient politics of the other political party. Despite the fact that the intended referent is not explicitly mentioned (the politician instead of using the personal pronoun, uses edo) the conveyed message is understood by the hearer since, a new politial conversation arised [Μιλάτε εσείς για το πώς φτάσαμε εδώ]

Thus, Time and Space are the starting points to conceptualize the metonymic uses of /edo/ & /ekei/. We cannot separate time from space in order to argue for metonymic alteration. The dominant image schema is that of container, part-whole and vice versa, diversion and splitting since the examples were drawn from political debates between the representatives of the political parties in the Hellenic Parliament. 

This brief paper is a part of a conference presentation, which will take place in Belgium, 2011. 

Critical Realism in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinarity and Citizenship

Capitalism has the capacity to overcome crisis by radically transforming itself periodically so that economic growth and profitability can continue; by virtue of such a transformation towards 'New Capitalism' the modification of restructuring relations between economic, political and social domains occurred.

The common idea of new capitalism as a 'knowledge-based' socio-economic order implies that it is also discourse-driven. The significance of language in these transformations endow with the performative power to bring into the very realities  of globalization, governance, flexibility and employability. Global space is represented as an entity, a place, 'the modern world' and it is a participant, rather than a circumstance. It is the passive subject and the logical object, which functions as an intermediate stretch of time which includes both pre and post-dates.

In Critical Discourse, interdiscursive analysis of texts is the mediating level of analysis, which is crucial in to integrating social and linguistic analysis. Under the manner of 'semiosis' social practices are networked so that to describe a particular social field. Social change is change in the networking and therefore, scalar changes in relations between global, regional, national and local  configurations, discourses and styles.

A language defines a certain potential, certain possibilities and at the same time excludes others. But texts as elements of social events are not simply the effects of potentials defined by languages. They exhibit intermediate organizational entities of a specifically linguistic sort; hence, they manifest the linguistic moments of networks of social practices like orders of discourse.